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Healing Process

Suffering can appear in our lives with little warning. It startles us out of complacency. One day we are swimming with the tide, just breezing through life, then wham! Disease and discord hit us when we aren’t looking. Suddenly our nice dip in the ocean becomes a terrifying race from the sharks that we had no idea were right below the surface.

Hardship in whatever form it manifests, can cause us to lose faith that life is on our side. It can render us incapable of trusting the ebb and flow of reality as we understand it.

When I was diagnosed with a chronic disease, I was utterly blindsided. I am a healing practitioner, so in the beginning stages of being sick I had faith that I would be more than capable of handling the issue and moving on with my life. I had multiple tools to help me.

I did all the work, taking a mind/body/spirit approach to the disease, but instead of getting better, I got worse. I did everything that I knew how to do as a healing practitioner, but all my knowledge was useless in the face of my wretched suffering.

I stopped trusting the process and began to believe that I must have done something horribly wrong to deserve the physical and emotional trauma that I was experiencing.

To top it all off, I had a belief that no one would want to see a healer with a chronic disease. How could anyone put their faith in me to help them, if I couldn’t even heal myself? A sick healer is a paradox.

I spent a good deal of time stoically putting on my best game face while seeking help from other practitioners behind closed doors. Everyone that I knew had plenty of advice to give me, from why I got sick to what might help me get better.

Conventional medicine, naturopaths, homeopaths, nutritionists, spiritual counselors, acupuncturists, biofeedback therapists, energy healers of all different types; you name it, I tried it. I stopped trusting the healthcare industry to give me answers, but the worst part about it all is that I stopped trusting my ability to help myself.

Suffering makes us feel weak, and in that weakness we become vulnerable. It’s a terrifying experience to recognize that no matter what we’ve been taught to believe, there are some things we don’t have control over. Sometimes when we allow ourselves to step into our vulnerability, we can feel like victims, victims to our bodies, our thoughts, our creative process that’s gone awry, to God, to the Universe, to genetics.

I have vacillated back and forth between all of these things. I blamed my ancestors, the environment, but mostly I held myself accountable for this disease. I have a firmly held belief that I am a co-creator of my reality, so clearly I must have made this happen.

I played the self-blame game very well. I decided that I can’t be trusted to care for myself when I am in this open, susceptible state. The Universe can’t be trusted either because it certainly didn’t have my back and stop me from creating this horrible mistake.

It didn’t even give me fair warning.

When we are raw and wounded, the first thing we throw out of the window is usually trust. The most natural reaction to our loss of faith is to wrap ourselves in a protective shell because we are afraid of what might come next. The world no longer feels safe.

When we become ill, whether it’s emotionally, spiritually, or physically, we tend to try to keep the world at a comfortable distance. Instead of stepping into our vulnerability, we hide it under the guise of courage and dignity.

Society rewards stoicism with praise. If we see a cancer patient, we say “Isn’t she brave? She never complains about the pain she’s in. She just keeps fighting. It’s amazing!” Very rarely do we acknowledge it when someone courageously embraces their vulnerability by taking a step into the darkness of their condition and seeing what gifts lie within the murky depths.

When we voice our fears or expose our vulnerability, it can frighten our loved ones. It makes people uncomfortable when they can see our wounds. It makes them remember their mortality and their own ability to suffer.

We often respond to this behavior by hiding behind a courageous mask, when the truth is that it makes us feel guilt, anger, and shame.

It’s time for us as healers to take that mask off. It is impossible to heal if we don’t allow the shadows of our creation to surface for healing, or try to hide them. Ignoring them is no longer an option.

Barbara Buck is a Foundational Reconnective Healing Practitioner, writer, and teacher. For more information, please visit her website at http://www.barbarabuck.org

“If God him/her/itself arrived at your doorstep for dinner, how would you treat him/her/it? Most likely with the utmost respect and reverence, right? So now you know how you should treat each emotion that arises as well.”

~Nikki Sapp

When you come to a point in your self-awareness process where you are beginning to become acutely aware of the emotional responses that are happening within you day-to-day, you may have found that there is a very fine line between showing support to yourself while you experience painful emotions and attaching yourself to the emotions as a sense of identity.

Walking this line, trying to find a balance between the two proves to be the difference between becoming a confident, healed and self-loving person, rooted in awareness rather than ego or being a victim of life, so intertwined with our painful emotions and the stories attached to them that they become extremely difficult to heal to completion.

While one should never use their idea of “being a positive person” as a means of trying to get rid of the natural emotions that are arising in them by methods of manipulation or judgment, there is undoubtedly approaches in dealing with painful or “negative emotions” that are in fact effective in helping them heal and transform all on their own, which in turn creates the space by which the blissful “positive” emotions that are our inherent nature can arise.

Seven Ways to Heal Negative Emotions

1. Acknowledge them

We cannot change that which we deny is even happening, which is why the very initial step to helping to create a space for healing for any emotion is to acknowledge it’s existence. You don’t even have to name the emotion if you are at a point where you can meditate and feel into the energy of the emotion, but nonetheless you must see that it is there.

Most emotions orbit repeatedly in our energy field because they have been feared, rejected or denied which only perpetuates them. When a painful emotion arises, that should tell you a deeper inquiry is required. Simply put, they are arising to be seen so that they can eventually be healed by you.

2. Honor Them

If we know that all stems from source (God/the divine/the omnipresent Universe) we should also know that even painful emotions fit into this category as well. Knowing this is a huge reason why honoring each emotion as God is hugely transformative.

If God him/her/itself arrived at your doorstep for dinner, how would you treat him/her/it? Most likely with the utmost respect and reverence, right?

So now you know how you should treat each emotion that arises as well. While it’s easy to treat joyful emotions with respect, it’s not as so with the emotions that feel painful in our body, but nonetheless that respect is required in assisting these emotions into a place where they can relax and dissolve into our awareness.

3. Do not blame them on anyone/ Do not own them as your own

Here is another approach that can be rather tricky, especially if you are new into self-awareness. Very often our emotions come as an onset after someone else’s behavior or words, which makes it “feel” like that person is to blame for the emotion. On one level of consciousness this may feel true, but those who are seasoned in self-awareness know something that takes this perspective into a higher truth.

That pearl of insight, is that people are coming into our lives to act as catalysts to bring up the very emotions that exist unhealed in our energy field. This means that rather than blaming them for causing the emotion (which completely disempowers us into needing them to change or apologize before we can heal), we can see them as messengers that provide unlikely clues into our own healing.

On the opposite end, we must also not become to attached to the idea of ownership from within either. We are the consciousness behind the emotion, so while there may be a limiting belief that is running a program in our subconscious mind that has been triggered by the action of another, it does not mean we ARE that emotion.

We are simply the awareness who has the power to heal that defunct programming and emotional block by observing it, feeling it, and respecting it — but not owning it.

4. See them as evidence of their opposite vibration

One helpful way to assist in actually having the courage to feel an emotion head on, is to know that emotions dissolve as a way to create space for their opposite to emerge. This means that all unworthiness — when actually faced and felt — is creating the healing space that makes way for worthiness to arise in it’s place.

Anytime you are able to pinpoint what emotion you are having, you can acknowledge it and also bless it with it’s opposite, or even just declare, “I accept that this fear of not having enough is the evidence that space is being created for abundance consciousness. In knowing this, I allow myself to feel this fear completely without judgment as it’s simply healing as I’m feeling it.”

5. Thank Them

As we come to know that no emotion arises as a mistake, we come to see some of the hidden gifts emotional responses contain. One is helping us identify where we are holding onto a subconscious belief or definition that is out of alignment with our highest truth.

All emotions stem from a belief, so no negative emotion can arise without there also being a belief behind it. Knowing this makes these emotions amazing gifts in helping us to re-write our subconscious beliefs!

By taking the time to sit with each emotion and appreciate it for the healing benefits and clues it contains, the emotions begin to soften and reveal their source — meaning the subconscious belief they stemmed from. As we re-write that belief we are able to heal that emotion.

6. Celebrate them

With many things on the spiritual journey it is the most ironic or unheard of approach that actually is effective. Probably the last thing you would ever think to do when a painful emotion arises is celebrate it’s arrival– which is why this approach is also hugely transformational.

Treat it like you truly cherish it’s arrival and are so humbled to have it’s presence and the wisdom it holds in your energy field. Watch how quickly you are able to detach from negativity when you do the one thing that you would have never thought to, which is actually celebrate it’s existence instead of judging or resisting it.

7. Welcome them back home into the light

Imagine your open heart as a doorway into the light for each emotion. As you open your heart and allow yourself to feel the energetic signature of each emotion, what you are actually doing is letting that emotion be welcomed into your heart space, which leads to the light that you are. The light is where all emotions go to heaven so to speak.

You may have heard the word alchemy in relation to the spiritual journey and this approach is exactly what that word means. Alchemists use the light of their true nature to be avenue by which painful emotions are dissolved into space — by simply feeling them to completion and welcoming them into their heart space.

It is important to note that it is most likely that you will need to use more than one or a combination of a few different approaches with each emotion. Nonetheless, it’s also important to remember to honor your humanity in all of this.

It’s often easy to see ourselves spiritual robots here to use our techniques to get rid of all that “negative energy” we don’t want to deal with, but without also honoring the part of us that innocently feels these emotions from a human place, we become the manipulators of our emotions vs. the safe place they long for to return home.